Month: March 2014

Each Office app features a slimmed down version of the dreaded ribbon interface, but it seems like Microsoft has prioritized editing tools to make the workflow easier on the iPad. “I want to do my best work on Windows and I want to do my best work on iPad and I want all of that to accrue to Office,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Re/code. “It’s really about being able to go where the opportunity is. If we can serve customers who expect our Office 365 everywhere … we will do well.”

It seems new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is admitting that he needs to embrace the iPad and stop fighting against it for Microsoft’s benefit. The Surface – Microsoft’s tablet-come-laptop is never going to outsell the iPad so concentrate on Microsoft’s strengths and get your software on Apple’s devices Nadella- everybody wins.

The second product Philips is announcing today is “hue tap” a round mountable switch to make it easy to control hue lights without needing to access the hue iPhone app. The hue tap includes four buttons to store lighting recipes that are accessible with a simple tap. The hue tap requires no wiring or batteries and is powered simply by the kinetic energy from users tapping on the switch. The hue tap will be available in the second half of this year and will be priced at $60.

No need for re-wiring of your main electrical light switch – this sounds perfect and technologically brilliant. I will be very interested to purchase one of these later this year.

I am just getting into home automation and will write about my findings including Philips Hue lights soon.

Multiple Attachments is clever in that it works with the Open In menu itself and Apple’s Mail app. Every time you need to send a message with multiple files in it, you can send one file at a time to Multiple Attachments using “Open In”; as you keep sending files to the app, it’ll show you their icons and names on its main screen. When you are ready to send a message with those files, hit the Share button and Multiple Attachments will bring up a Mail panel, composing a new message with the files you’ve sent to the app. Then, you only need to confirm the email account you want to send from, and you’re done.

Essentially, Multiple Attachments works as a container of temporary files based on two of Apple’s inter-app communication features – Open In and Mail sharing. The app stores files until you send them (or delete them with the Trash button), and it’s clever in how it combines temporary storage with the ability to send emails outside the main Mail app. Attachments can be previewed individually, and, in my tests, the app performed as advertised, collecting files sent via Open In and sending them as a message with multiple attachments using accounts configured in Mail. It’s a rudimentary solution, but it works.

Someday, it’s likely that Apple will revamp how iOS apps communicate with each other and offer a way to collect multiple files in an email message at once. Until that day, Multiple Attachments provides a simple way to send an email message with multiple files on an iPhone and iPad – it’s a small victory, especially if you work on iOS a lot every day.

Nice app for us iOS power users and as Federico says, Apple are likely to build this functionality into iOS in the future, so for now this is a nice work-around.

Instead, Apple is serving its digital content to U.K. customers from Ireland, where the VAT rate is 23%.

The Cupertino company confirms this in the “Payment & VAT” help section on its website, which reads: “The VAT rate for Apple customers who purchase Electronic Software Downloads or other Apple products which are classified as services under EU VAT law will be 23% Irish VAT.”

“This is because the place of supply of these products under EU VAT law is Ireland as the country from where Apple Distribution International makes these supplies.”

With that being the case, customers in the U.K. will actually pay less VAT under the new rules, meaning iTunes and App Store prices should fall a little.

In reality, Apple is likely to leave them as they are and pocket the difference — but at least prices won’t be going up like you may have been led to believe.

Potentially good news! Nothing can happen until 2015 anyway but it does sound like the early reports may have jumped the gun.

Members of the UK government are seeking to close a tax loophole that currently allows online music, app, and book downloads to avoid the country’s 20% “value added tax” in favor of much lower international tax rates, reports The Guardian. If the push is successful, iTunes customers in the UK will instead be taxed at the appropriate rate for their own country.

However, the new law won’t go into effect until January 1, 2015, so there’s still time for things to change. Supporters of the change say that it will lead to more fair competition among foreign and domestic companies, since UK-based companies are currently at a major disadvantage due to the higher tax rate.

British Apple TV owners have been longing for the BBC iPlayer on our favorite black box pretty much forever, but now we might finally know why it hasn’t happened. BBC’s Chris Yanda has outlined why they went Chromecast, and not Apple TV.

One of the reasons we decided to support Chromecast was that Apple TV currently works only with Apple devices. Chromecast has SDKs available for a number of different platforms including iOS, Android, and the Chrome browser for laptop and desktop computers.

iPhone and iPad owners can get a proper iPlayer experience on their TV using Chromecast. It works really well, but I have to confess to being massively disappointed, still, that it isn’t on the Apple TV. From what Yanda says, it doesn’t look like we can expect to see it any time soon.

It’s still not a particularly great reason, either. The Chromecast is a totally different product to the Apple TV. It requires a mobile device or the Chrome browser to operate – even if it takes the streams directly from the content provider, not from your phone. Apple TV just sits there under your TV, whether you have any other Apple product or not. Chromecast however does mean the BBC just had to add to its existing iOS and Android iPlayer apps to enable the functionality. Apple TV would require a dedicated channel.

Shine is fantastic CV/resume creation app which can make your CV/resume look polished, professional and perfect. You don’t have to worry about designing the look – the app has amazing templates to care of that, you just need to enter your information and the app takes care of the rest.

When you are hunting for a new career direction or just managing your own personal files, your CV/resume is probably sitting on your computer somewhere as a Microsoft Word document and maybe has not been updated in a while. If you are not particularly confident on a computer, perhaps your CV/resume is pretty basic to look at as well with just your recent work history, interests and references.

Shine changes all this. The way the app works is that you enter all the information that the app requires, then the app will take that information and apply it to a several different templates to choose from. You can even use a different template each time you want to print or share your document – without editing any of your text that you previously keyed in.

The notes state:

Email and print high resolution print-ready PDFs and images right from your iPad.

It’s one of those apps that will stay on my iPad tucked away in a folder with my CV/Resume all ready to be shared if needed and best of all it will look miles better than the version knocked up in Microsoft Word..